Anyone who bothered to wade through the entirety of the opinion should be left shocked and outraged by what our federal overseers did: They targeted Americans and their speech and demanded censorship based on the content and viewpoints expressed — ones that contradicted the official government position.
Sure, the speech censored was overwhelmingly conservative — a fact the court highlighted — but that should not matter. After all, as Judge Doughty stressed, “the right to free speech is not a member of any political party and does not hold any political ideology. It is the purpose of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail…”
Apparently, it did matter, however, for the outrage from the left centered not on the government’s conduct, but on the judge’s injunction. And left-wing sentiments seemed unaffected by our government seeking censorship of supposed “medical misinformation.”
As The Washington Post’s editorial board reasoned, if communicating threats to “the public safety or security of the United States” to social media is permissible, why not also “other threats?” Why not warn social media companies about “medical misinformation during a public health emergency?”
The answer is simple, and Judge Doughty put it simply: The Government “does not have the right to determine the truth.”
Yet that is precisely the role our government took on during the Covid-19 pandemic, assuming “a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’” Doughty said.